Students’ art show, June 1964 - newspaper cutting

Students’ art show, June 1964 – newspaper cutting

1964_Cutting

Image caption: Twenty years-old Michael Smith with his sculpture exhibited in the show.

 

Article Text:

‘Ultra-modern art, in these days of space travel, is becoming more and more the thing with budding artists. All this week, at the Kingston School of Art, Knight’s Park, there has been an exhibition of the student’s work entitled “Image and Eye”.

The exhibition, covering paintings, drawings, sculpture and prints, is compact and varied but it is unfortunate that the overall standard of the pieces on view should vary so much in style, ideas and execution.

Considering that all the artists who contributed to the exhibition are students, some of the work has reached a very high standard. Some, unfortunately, is very mediocre and the exhibition as such would have lost none of its appeal – it would, in fact, have benefitted – had it been cut by a quarter.

In particular, the silkscreen work of Gay Beste; the charcoal drawings of Ann Finlayson; the construction work of Ken Draper; and the paintings of Keith Baugh and Judith Lear deserve mention. Here are young artists in different fields who, despite the obvious errors that creep into their work, appear to have a bright future.

Taken all-round, though, this exhibition shows that the young artists of Kingston can think for themselves. All that they require now is the will-power and courage to recognise their own faults, however cruel it may seem, and experiment until these errors are rectified.’